


Bombs Away

by tokillthatmockingbird



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Zombies, Come on, F/M, Gen, M/M, all of the avengers make apperances, and fantastic four peeps walking around, but we've got xmen, i only tagged major players in the story, plus clintasha baby, there's some steve/bucky and steve/peggy here, what more could you want, zombie apocalypse AU
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-05-12
Updated: 2014-05-12
Packaged: 2018-01-24 13:12:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,125
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1606418
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tokillthatmockingbird/pseuds/tokillthatmockingbird
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dead was dead in the end. It didn’t matter how long ago they were breathing. He killed them all. And once he did, he moved on.</p>
<p>Or, the one where a zombie apocalypse grips the United States, and Tony's stuck right in the middle of it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bombs Away

The day would have been pretty un-extraordinary if it hadn’t been the day that the World As We Know It ended.

It was a Sunday, neither hot nor cold, neither sunny nor rainy. When Tony woke up in the morning, JARVIS read him the morning paper, he drank a cup of coffee, considered trading a few stocks, avoided Pepper as she fluttered over his breakfast cereal. Routine. Boring. It was the kind of start to the day that guaranteed nothing but normalcy.

Not surprisingly, Tony was drunk when the lights went out.

Joe the bartender muttered something about those “damn rolling blackouts” and bumped around under the bar for a flashlight. Tony spilled his gin on his pants. When the power flickered back on, his mouth was drawn into the semblance of a smile, a joke on his wetted lips, and Joe’s eyes were bright green.

It wouldn’t have been so striking if they weren’t blue just eight seconds before.

Falling backwards off his stool was half-fear and half-intoxication. The adrenaline was enough to spark some clarity in the haze, and Tony rocketed out of the bar, green eyes lighting up all around him. Out on the street, lower Manhattan was still flickering back to life, and the air was thick with dry moaning. On each corner, partners were ripped apart by illuminated irises and horrified screeching. Tony watched, slack-jawed as a woman took her husband’s neck in her teeth and pulled. There was a spray of blood, a gurgled gag, and the man fell to the concrete, convulsing.

Pepper. He needed Pepper.

He careened around the corner, a stumble and a drop dead sprint, centering himself on the pulsating STARK at the skyline. “JARVIS, call Pepper!” he demanded.

“It seems that all lines in the city are being jammed, sir,” JARVIS replied, a calm voice in his ear, contrary to the grotesque hum that swallowed the city. Tony disengaged, running on the balls of his feet, forcing his way against the tidal wave of screaming citizens. By the time he got to the foot of the tower, he had lost his jacket and one of his shoes. There was a steady pounding in his heart and a trickle of warm blood matting into his beard.

The lobby was dim, void of life. Potted plants were overturned, their contents spilled like guts across a tiled floor. On the ground behind the front desk, a security guard Tony was supposed to know but didn’t stared vacantly, unblinking at the ceiling. He tried to circumvent the system to override all security clearances to get to the top floor, but the system went offline with some type of never-before-seen permanence. Tony shouldered through the side entrance and ran up the twenty flights of stairs, losing his second shoe and all of his breath.

“ _Pepper_!” he called. His reply was his echo, thrown back to him from the deep recesses of his never-ending studio.

  
  
  


For one year, he didn’t know where he was. He woke up, cotton-mouthed and dry-eyed, seeking asylum in the next dumpster, in what he wanted to be the next grave, and somehow, always waking up alive.

Not everyone he met was that lucky.

The apocalypse is not a solitary event. Everyone that met eyes, everyone that shuffled around in the dark was affected. In some bizarre way, while the Dead ripped apart families and friends, they tied ropes around the wrists of the Living, connecting them all by taut thread of grieving. When plucked, it reverberated. Those with heart felt it every time. Those with blank stares and battle torn minds let the pulse travel to the next one in line.

It took up too much time and energy to care, two things that were too precious nowadays to waste. Tony had cared, in the beginning, when he hadn’t realized that there was a reserve of such things, when he had been convinced that the world was just going through a phase, like some rebellious teenager— spitting the dead back out of the dirt and tattooing the earth with blood. It had been about a month after his numb flight from Stark Tower when he realized his tank of affection had leaked dry. Then he set his jaw and watched the Living become the Dead, and where he could barely make himself care for the Living, he cared even less for the Dead.

Dead was dead in the end. It didn’t matter how long ago they were breathing. He killed them all. And once he did, he moved on.

Tony spent a sizeable portion of the year alone, lower than a scavenger, elbowing through dusty glass windows into abandoned bars and getting drunk on whatever he could find. He clinked when he walked most days, bottles in his pack jostling together with his crooked gait. (At some point, he had drunkenly fallen in some shallow pit and injured his ankle. It hadn’t been the same in weeks.) He was a beacon for the Dead to follow, noisy and graceless, stumbling through the woods smelling fermented and so alive. But he didn’t die. He never died.

He joined bands of others because he had to survive even though he didn’t want to, even though he didn’t know why. It was just the animal instinct in him, the clawing at the lining of his chest that reminded him he was one of the lucky ones. If you could call this lucky. Part of him needed other people, needed the social portion of his mind to be satisfied even by the lowest echelons of the old society, even by the types of people who he wouldn’t allow to shine his shoes back in Old New York.

But that was before the black out. This was now. Now there was no class divide, just those with the skills to live and those with the skills to live longer. (Those without those skills were the Dead.) There was a distinct feeling of unity in New that lacked in Old. No longer were people concerned about the skin color of their neighbors or the sexuality of their children’s teachers. It didn’t matter who you worshipped or how many digits were on your paycheck. If you knew the basic tenants of survival, you were worth something to everyone.

Tony argued those without survival skills were more helpful because they’re the ones who’d get eaten before you. Too slow to get away. Too dumb to hide. Too inexperienced to kill. They were worth something because they bought you _time_. And Tony was conscious enough of this world that he knew how fluid time was, how days were like weeks but hours like seconds, and if you spent one moment thinking about the past, you’d never survive the next five minutes.

With no conscious thought, each group Tony slipped into developed its own quirks. Campfires at each site. Had to settle down by a running stream. Two people on watch. Three people on watch. Boys and girls can’t sleep side-by-side. A series of idiosyncrasies both strange and beautiful— reassuring that humans could still act as such when the world went to shit, that everyone could still be their weird selves under a layer of grime and gore and exhaustion.

He’d woken up under an upheaved canoe, in three different haylofts, in the limbs of too many trees. Tony slept where he stood and stood where he slept and spent a year finding pockets of time long enough to satisfy his crippling exhaustion and short enough that groups didn’t leave him behind come sun-up.

It had been so long that he had slept in an honest-to-goodness bed that Tony had almost forgotten the creature comforts that a mattress could provide. That was until he woke up with a throbbing headache, a black eye, and a puddle of drool on his pillow.

“Good morning, Sleeping Beauty,” Sam Wilson crooned. “Welcome to Camp Dawning.”

  
  
  


Camp Dawning was a repurposed military unit, slightly rubbled and spotted with perfectly pitched but faded tents. The original fence surrounded the perimeter, reinforced in areas where rust had eaten out the corrugated metal, places where the Dead could leak in. Tony stumbled after Sam as he expertly cut through crowds of people.

Along the walls, serious-looking men with guns strapped to their chest patrolled. Small children, statistically miracles to be alive in a time like this, darted between the legs of milling adults, all in various states of distress but without the lines of complete despair etched into their faces. A few white-haired citizens sat at scarred picnic table with knitting needles and decks of creased playing cards. Tony watched college-aged students toss a frisbee behind one of cement-walled buildings, watched men disappear between the flaps of the tents. There was a layer of grime light on the skin of each person, but a few people were smiling.

The sound of laughter choked Tony. He hadn’t heard it in so long it felt foreign, like a language he had never learned.

While a man named Dr. Richards poked and prodded Tony, Sam asked just three questions:

 

> Are you crazy?
> 
> Are you alone?
> 
> Any allergies we should know about?

 

> Maybe. Yes. No.

 

His answers earned a toothy smile from the young man, who did nothing but offer a warm hand and said, “Great. You’ll fit in just fine.” He fitted Tony with an old-new set of clothes, hand-me-downs from someone who had outgrown them or who most likely died before getting to wear them again. They smelled freshly laundered, not like the perfumed soap of Before but the sterility of cleanliness all the same, despite a stain on the right leg of the pants and a mysterious discoloring on the collar of the shirt.

He noticed, while shoving his feet into a pair of old-new boots, that his bum ankle had been wrapped securely in a bandage. It barely hurt to flex. When he looked up at Sam, the man smiled again. That was the third time. He seemed to not understand the Happiness Quota demanded by an apocalypse and wasted so many smiles on Tony.

“Dr. Richards saw that it was swollen and took the liberty to fix you up,” he said.

Tony grunted, a semblance of gratefulness, before he laced up the boots and followed Sam into the maw of the camp.

“I’m sure you’ve got a lot of questions,” Sam said as he cut a straight line towards a squat, gray building in the middle of the grounds. “What’s the last thing you remember?”

“Um,” Tony rubbed a throbbing spot on his forehead. “I fell and apparently crushed my skull on a rock.”

“Close,” Sam said. “You were being chased by a herd of Zs and tripped on a tree root just a couple hundred yards out from our track.” Tony almost asked why, of all things, did Camp Dawning find maintaining a running track important during an apocalypse, but apparently it saved his life in some roundabout way. He bit his tongue. “Agent Barton saw you from the Eagle’s Nest.” Sam gestured to one of the towers on either side of the massive, reinforced gates, which seemed to be the only entrance in and out of the campsite. A man toting a bow and arrow paced the deck of one. Tony, straining his eyes into the distance, spotted two watch towers at each wall, all monitored by a weapon-toting camp member.

“This is not how I remember summer camp.”

Sam smiled, entertained Tony’s dark humor perhaps because he had to, perhaps because it had been weeks since someone had tried to make him laugh. Many people in Camp Dawning had unofficially decided that laughter was distasteful during this time that the Dead roamed the earth. They were not without humor, merely acutely aware that any person in their radius could be grieving. They tended towards sensitivity because the world was harsh enough already. It was the children who continued to spark joy into the dreary, gray lives of the camp. Sam would have spent his entire days consumed by their unconstrained giggles if he hadn’t been delegated his very important position of camp therapist and, apparently, tour guide.

“Better than summer camp, man. Girls and guys can share bunks,” Sam teased. He paused before the central unit of the camp. A smoke stack had been hastily erected in the back, emitting a thick cloud of dark haze. Beside the door was a list of rules:

 

> 1) Food stays in mess hall.
> 
> 2) Hands must be clean.
> 
> 3) Children first.
> 
> 4) Must stay out for 24 hours after contact with Dead. Arrange a meal plan at Tent 1.
> 
> 5) Report to Medical Bay any allergies.

 

Then a smaller board for meal times and a map of exit points ICZA: In Case of Zombie Attack.

“You came just in time for lunch,” Sam said, shouldering open the door. “You hungry?”

Hunger had become as commonplace in his body as the bones he had been born with, and Tony nodded vigorously, allowing himself to show desperation that he would not have awarded anyone Before. He had never known hunger Before, never wanted for anything other than seconds. Now he craved scraps. Now he craved the bare minimum.

People had always warned him that his money was nothing but a number, that his wealth would be a thin veil of comfort in the long run. He just never thought he would see the day that all of his work would amount to dollar bills fading uselessly in a bank vault. They said that on his death bed, he’d see how little his money was actually worth, but here Tony was, unfortunately, alive. And he could write a check for a million dollars to the next person who walked by, and it still wouldn’t get him a bite to eat. It was Tony’s largest social insecurity magnified into an entire system of survival: if people didn’t want him for his money, he couldn’t quite figure out what they wanted him for at all.

“Let’s get you some grub, and you can meet the folks in charge.”

Despite the outside of the building being perfectly silent, inside the mess hall was a cacophony of socialization. People lined the walls, plates in scrubbed hands, winding around the perimeter for their chance at the cafeteria window; three cooks with hair tucked humorously into nets stood behind it, scooping piles of potatoes, canned vegetables, noodles onto trays. Neat rows of hodge-podge tables filled the hall. Men, women, young, old sat shoulder-to-shoulder sharing stories, smiles, grievances over steaming plates of food.

At the back of the room was one smaller table running perpendicular to the rest. At the head was a large blonde-bearded man, thick arms wrapped tight in protective gear, focused singularly on the pallid, thin man beside him while he animatedly gestured through his story. A redheaded woman sat with her back to Tony, twirling a paring knife in her fingers dangerously close to the face of an unflinching man with what looked to be a prosthetic arm.

“I take it those are the bosses,” Tony said, nodding towards the head table as Sam guided him into line. His stomach growled pathetically, disguised by the din of the cafeteria.

Sam nodded. “The blonde at the head of the table? He’s the boss, I guess. BLO, his family—”

“BLO?”

“Before Lights Out?” Sam offered. “We use it as a way to say before this whole mess started, I guess.” He shrugged his shoulders. “Well, his family were the 21st Century Kennedys. Didn’t have a third cousin that wasn’t in the government. His brother, the skinny black-haired guy, he was the first one of the Odinsons who didn’t win a local election in the last twenty years. Ran against the big guy himself.”

Tony raised a brow. “He ran against his brother?” Tony was a chronic only child, and his family was far from a quintessential American nuclear specimen, but he knew enough to know that their sibling rivalry was rather atypically intense.

“But clearly there weren’t a lot of harsh feelings there,” Sam said, gesturing to where the blonde dared a laugh at his brother’s joke. “Then you’ve got Natasha. Don’t know much about her BLO, but I assume she was a ninja? She’s got wicked martial arts skills, and the only person in this whole damn camp with her precision on the shooting range is Barton. But don’t tell her I said that.

“Next to her, that’s James Barnes. Lost his arm over in Frankfurt. Freak accident. He was on the way to the airport from a tour in Iraq when his train derailed. He—” Sam hesitated, watched the aforementioned man with weariness before redirecting his thought. “Well, he’s really in charge of training the civilians with Steve—”

“Steve?” Tony asked. They had run out of heads at the table.

Sam pointed to a tall, broad-shouldered blonde bobbing through the aisles of tables. “Captain Steve Rogers. Did a few tours overseas. Went on leave when Barnes was in the hospital in Germany. He was four days short of going back when Lights Out happened. He and the Odinsons started this place together just two months into the mess. Repurposed the whole thing, stocked the armory, everything. If they missed a detail, one of the team was able to fill in the gaps. And here we are: Camp Dawning. Bunch of misfits stuck in an old army base, getting excited about Taco Friday.”

“So does every new recruit get to meet the Dream Team?” Tony asked, eyeing the blonde who was now engrossed in conversation with an elderly lady trying to probably strangle him with a homemade scarf in puce colors.

Sam made a noncommittal sound and picked up two mismatched plates from a small bin. “Eventually, yeah, but you’re getting VIP treatment, Mr. Stark.”

Tony felt a pang of remembrance, a creature comfort purring deep in his chest at being recognized as someone who was once, at least, considered important to others. Being ordinary fit him like a sock on a hand. “I’m all for VIP treatment,” he said, taking the offered plate from his host, “but I gotta tell you, I’m not really sure what you all want with a guy who tripped over a tree root on the way in.”

“I told you,” Sam said with a grin, “Rogers and Barnes were in the military before this whole thing went down. Whose name do you think was on their weapons?”

Tony blinked in shock, pausing while the line tried to shuffle forward. “They want my weapons?”

Sam shrugged. “I don’t know what they want with you yet, man,” he laughed. “I’m just a tour guide.”

 

 


End file.
